Bertrand networks

  • Authors:
  • Moshe Babaioff;Brendan Lucier;Noam Nisan

  • Affiliations:
  • Microsoft Research Silicon Valley, Mountain view, CA, USA;Microsoft Research, New England, Cambridge, MA, USA;Microsoft Research, Silicon Valley, Mountain view, CA, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the fourteenth ACM conference on Electronic commerce
  • Year:
  • 2013

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Abstract

We study scenarios where multiple sellers of a homogeneous good compete on prices, where each seller can only sell to some subset of the buyers. Crucially, sellers cannot price-discriminate between buyers. We model the structure of the competition by a graph (or hyper-graph), with nodes representing the sellers and edges representing populations of buyers. We study equilibria in the game between the sellers, prove that they always exist, and present various structural, quantitative, and computational results about them. We also analyze the equilibria completely for a few cases. Many questions are left open.